


The Final Frontier

by tasalmalin



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-08-30 05:33:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8520406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tasalmalin/pseuds/tasalmalin
Summary: Breanne Rebecca Banner never stops reaching for the stars





	

**Author's Note:**

> Art for this story by the amazing [paleogymnast](http://archiveofourown.org/users/paleogymnast/pseuds/paleogymnast), who made an incredible four pieces of art for this story! All the art can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8520670), and all my thanks to such a great artist! Thanks also to the people over at [Marvel Bang](http://marvel-bang.livejournal.com/), who did a great job running everything.
> 
> Warnings: Some non-explicit references to bullying and discrimination. Self-esteem issues, brief homelessness and the existence of the General Ross, whose aggressive, controlling behavior is really very disturbing.
> 
> Big warning: the first two scenes address Breanna's childhood, the same as Bruce Banner's canon backstory. This (spoilers) involves explicit domestic violence towards both her mom and Breanna, who is very young (4 and 8), and in the second scene, major character death. This pretty much sums up the first two scenes if you want to skip that part, the only thing you'll miss (more spoilers obviously) is that Breanna loves outer space and Star Trek, and she's a genius with math.

                                  

Becky Banner is four years old today. Some kids are really into princesses and tea parties at that age. Some are really into dinosaurs.

Becky is really into space.

She has glow-in-the-dark stickers on her walls and ceiling, and a model of the solar system hanging from her ceiling fan. Her bedside lamp projects constellations onto the walls, and of course she has space blankets and space pillows and piles of space books in every corner of the room.

She especially likes the one that has pictures that pop up out of the page. She and her mom read it together every night.

Today is special because Father is going to be home. He has a Very Important Job and doesn’t have time for silly kid books or looking at the stars, which are far away and won’t ever do anything for them. She always has to be very quiet when he’s working, and not get in the way or be a nuisance.

But right now he’s supposed to be done work. He’s supposed to be home.

“Why don’t you go ahead and open your presents, sweetheart,” Mom says, and Becky almost doesn’t see the sad behind her smile.

She smiles extra big, to chase the sad away. “Okay!”

There’s a science blue t-shirt with the _Enterprise_ symbol, because _Star Trek_ is her favorite show. There’s fuzzy socks covered in stars and a new big kid book about Astronomy (she sounds it out herself). And there’s a box with a picture of the _Enterprise_.

She opens it, and a whole bunch of little bits in plastic bags fall out.

“See, you put them together,” Mom says. “And then you have an _Enterprise_ all your own, just like on the box. We can do it together after you come home from school.”

This is the most incredible thing Becky has ever heard. Build a starship! She could fly it all the way to the stars!

“Well, almost,” Mom says, smiling for real now. “This is just a little ship. A toy ship. But when you’re all grown up, maybe you really can build a ship that really can fly to the stars.”

There’s a sound in the hall.

“Father’s home!” Becky says, jumping up.

“Why don’t you open your spaceship,” Mom says, “while I go check on your father.”

Maybe Father is still busy. He’s very angry when Becky interrupts him when he’s busy; he shouts a lot, and it makes Mom cry. Becky doesn’t cry, though, even when he’s very loud, because she doesn’t want to make Mom cry, too, and Mom is always sad when Becky is sad.

So she sits down and says, “It’s a starship Mom, not a spaceship.”

Mom isn’t listening; she’s already gone.

Becky opens all the bags, and finds a little book with a picture of the pieces all laid out. Well, that’s nice of them to put it in a picture like that.

Once that’s done, Mom and Father still aren’t back yet.

Becky looks at the little book. There are more pictures, showing which pieces go together.

It doesn’t look that hard.

She glances towards the front hall, but no one’s there.

Well, maybe if she just gets it started, just a little. That’s not being a nuisance at all.

She’s very carefully putting the NCC-1701 sticker on the saucer when Father finally comes in, Mom right behind him.

He stops short, and Becky knows she’s done a Big No.

Slowly, she puts her starship down, behind the couch where maybe he won’t see it.

“What are you doing?” he bellows.

“N-nothing,” she stammers.

He crosses the room in two long strides, picks up her _Enterprise_ , and throws it against the wall.

Pieces fly everywhere.

“Brian!” Mom says sharply.

“It’s not natural!” he shouts, and Becky cringes against the arm of the couch, trying to make herself smaller, unseen. “She’s a freak!”

Father calls her that a lot; she’s still not sure what it means, just that it’s Very Bad. She shouldn’t have touched the starship while Mom was gone, and now Father is angry and it’s all broken and Mom will cry again.

He picks her up by the front of her shirt, her favorite, with the planets smiling and waving as a little spaceship goes by, and hits her right in her face.

Stunned, she just hangs there limply, then starts to cry, even though she knows she shouldn’t, because now Mom will be sad.

“Brian!” Mom says again, angry instead of sad, and grabs him by the shoulder and spins him around.

He drops Becky, and she crawls behind the couch, in that narrow gap above the radiator she’s almost too big to fit in. She makes herself very small, and very quiet, and hopes no one will see her.

He hits Mom in her face. A lot of times. She curls up in a ball and cries, and Becky wants to help her but what can she do when Father is so big and so angry, and her face hurts and she’s already ruined everything when Mom just wanted to have a special day together?

Father kicks Mom and walks away, swearing, and Becky hears the fridge door slamming.

Becky stays where she is. He always shouts more when he has the brown bottle. She doesn’t want to be noticed now.

Mom gets up and goes to the bathroom. She comes out with a lot of bandaids, and she cleans Becky’s face and puts a bandaid on her lip, where it doesn’t stick right.

Becky holds it in her teeth, then puts some bandaids on Mom’s face, too. It takes a lot of bandaids.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Mom says, and her voice sounds funny.

“You should go to sleep, Mom,” Becky says.

“You first, baby,” Mom says, and together they sneak into Becky’s room and hide under her star-covered blanket.

Late that night, when Father is snoring and Mom has gone back to her room, Becky creeps out into the living room. She crawls on the carpet in the dark, searching for all the little pieces.

She puts her _Enterprise_ back together in the bathroom at preschool the next day. A couple of pieces are missing, and her NCC-1701 sticker is ripped, but it still looks okay. She hides it in her backpack.

There’s a loose floorboard in her room, and her _Enterprise_ fits just right in the space underneath.

She wonders if it’s wrong, to keep it, when she got her Mom got hurt so bad, and her mouth is sore and the bandaid won’t stay to make it better. But she still wants to go to the stars, so she hides it away, her own little secret.

~*~

Breanne Banner is eight years old.

There’s no party.

“Breanne,” Father says. “Try it again.”

She clutches her pencil, staring at the question before her. It’s math, and math is easy for her. She knows the answer.

The real question, always the real question, is whether Father wants her to know. Do good, smart girls know the answer, or only freaky girls?

“I don’t know,” she says.

He wraps his hand in her hair, and slams her face down against the table.

“Liar!”

His breath smells bad. It always smells bad, now.

“Tell the truth!”

There’s a faint red circle on the paper where her nose bled a little. She watches it, and a drop splashes right in the middle.

“Try again,” he says.

Her pencil scratches against the paper. The true answer is never the right answer, she’s learned that much. She has to show him how she got to the answer. That means a lot of writing numbers, and she gets in trouble if she does that part wrong, though not as bad as when she just skips right to the end.

She makes a mistake, and he hits her hand. Her pencil breaks.

She picks up the broken end, and erases her last line.

“What is going on here?” Mom asks.

She doesn’t shout, she doesn’t demand. Only Father is allowed to do that now. But she still interrupts, and Breanne wishes she wouldn’t.

It’s vacation now, but soon Breanne will go back to school. Father can’t hurt her so bad when she has to go to school. Mom never has to go to school, and she always gets hurt bad.

Father’s standing and shouting, and the way he can’t stand quite straight means it’s going to be real bad.

Breanne slouches down in her chair until she can slide down under the table. They don’t notice her, and she is quiet as the void of space.

She can hear the smacking sounds, but she closes her eyes and doesn’t look.

Then the table shakes where Mom crashes into it, and she falls on the floor.

Breanne opens her eyes.

There’s a great big hole in her head, and her eyes are wide and staring. She isn’t moving.

Father is screaming and shouting, louder than he ever has, running around the kitchen and banging on the counter and opening the drawers.

Mom still doesn’t move.

Breanne closes her eyes tight as she can, curls up in a tiny ball, and hopes Father doesn’t notice her.

~*~

Bree Banner is fifteen years old today.

Aunt Susan decides to celebrate in a nice restaurant, with cloth napkins and two different forks.

“Are you sure you don’t want to invite some of your friends?” she asks.

Bree shrugs. She doesn’t want to admit that she doesn’t have any friends. Last time, her aunt made her go back and see the therapist again.

Bree is sick to death of therapists. What can they do? What can they say? Her Mom is dead, and Father is in jail, probably for a very long time. All the talking in the world isn’t going to change that.

“She wanted to spend some quality time with us,” Jenny says, coming to her rescue.

Jenny is a great cousin, almost like a sister. She always talks to Bree at school, even when no one else does, and she shares her house and her room and her family and never complains about it.

“Well, okay,” Aunt Susan says, and that was that. She coaxes the ancient car into rumbling to life, and they go down to the Olive Garden and drink lemonade out of fancy glasses and mangle the fancy Italian names for the food.

Aunt Susan gives her a model rocket, which is made for a much younger person, but she tries. Bree knows that they’ll all trek down to the abandoned softball field and set it off, and she and Jenny will race to catch the parachute.

Jenny gets her a college textbook. There’s a big yellow USED sticker on the spine, but it’s only a little worn, and she likes when a book comes pre-highlighted, because it gives her an idea of what’s important.

Aunt Susan gives the book a dubious look, but Bree is obviously happy with it, so she doesn’t say anything.

There’s a gift card for the bookstore from the Sheriff. He had an unexpected shift change and couldn’t make it, which is just fine with Bree. It’s not that he’s a bad person, he’s just… big. And loud. And often angry.

It’s better just the three of them.

And for the special occasion, they even get dessert, with a candle.

Everything’s back to normal the next day, and Bree gets shoved into the lockers twice before lunch. At least she isn’t put in lockers anymore. She grew another two inches over the summer and won’t fit.

“You shouldn’t let them push you around,” Jenny says.

Bree nods to show she’s listening and goes to class. She keeps her head down, and no one notices her.

She and Jenny always eat lunch together, and Jenny’s friends have decided to tolerate Jenny’s little quirks so long as they don’t actually have to talk to Bree the Pariah. It’s an arrangement that works for everyone.

Jenny is so unfailingly kind and optimistic. She wants to go to law school and become a civil rights attorney and reform the system. What she doesn’t understand is, there are the Jennys of the world, who are beautiful and popular and just the right amount of smart, and then there’s Bree, who’s too tall and has kind of a squashed face and thick glasses because she’s almost blind, and she used to correct her teachers in class before she learned not to talk back.

But Jenny never stops trying. She’s the one who comes up with ‘Bree,’ because it’s a very in name right now, and she’s always the first to jump in when she thinks Bree is being bullied. She dragged Bree to field hockey practice (Jenny was made captain as a sophomore), and she keeps her head when they discover that Bree is seriously allergic to beestings. She forces her friends to be civil in her presence.

Bree loves her cousin, she really does.

Just, sometimes, she wishes she _was_ her cousin.

~*~

Rebecca Banner is eighteen years old today. She’s going to enlist in the Navy. Aunt Susan doesn’t have a lot of money, and Jenny is already accepted to college, ready to embark on her quest to save the world, so she needs it more than Rebecca does.

The one time she mentioned her plans, she got the feeling Aunt Susan didn’t quite approve, but Rebecca is going to have to make her own way, and she doesn’t have a lot of choices.

She is a little unsure; she’s seen movies, and the military seems to involve a lot of… shouting, and killing people, but she still has a battered little _Enterprise_ in her room and she’s going to get out there and see the stars someday, and that means flight training, and that means the Navy.

Mom always believed in her, and Rebecca won’t give up on their dream.

“I want to enlist,” she says. “I’m eighteen today.”

The man behind the counter slowly looks up from his desk. He has a lot of jaw. “Uh huh.”

Rebecca blushes, but she holds up her driver’s license as proof. “So are there some forms to fill out?”

He reaches out and takes a clipboard with one, huge hand. It’s almost as big as the whole clipboard.

“Let me make it easy for you,” he says. He flips to the middle of the packet. “Do you have any pre-existing medical conditions? Allergies? Asthma?”

“Ye-es,” she says, and old instincts are telling her that while this is the true answer, it isn’t the right answer.

“Uh huh. And those glasses? What’s your vision like?”

She tells him.

He puts the clipboard down on his desk, nowhere near her.

“Kid,” he says. “Let me do you a favor. There are certain medical qualifications. And you have to pass a physical test. What’s your mile time? How many pushups can you do?”

She can feel herself shrinking, her shoulders drawing in on themselves.

“But-“

He takes the résumé she so painstakingly created, and skims it. His eyebrows go up. “You’re a smart kid, I can see that. I’m sure you’re going to do great things. Just, not with the Navy.”

He hands her back the paper.

Rebecca just stands there holding it, wishing she could disappear.

~*~

Anne Banner is twenty-three years old. She scraped together enough for the community college down the road, and she overloaded her first year so she could take every math and science class they offered. She keeps the classes that come easily, and by the time she graduates valedictorian she’s a physicist.

And now she’s here, with a new name and a new start. She’s standing on the steps of Culver University, a shiny new grad student with aspirations for a Masters, then a Doctorate.

She clutches her new student information packet tightly to her chest. The building is… intimidating. It looks like it belongs in a movie.

It doesn’t look like a place she belongs.

Someone walks past her wearing what looks like a real Rolex, and his shirt has that little alligator picture that means money.

She bets none of them got free lunch at school, or worked forty hours a week to afford community college.

She doesn’t belong here.

Someone bumps into her, and she drops her packet, papers scattering everywhere.

“Oops, sorry, didn’t see you there,” that same someone says, bending down to help her gather everything up.

“No problem,” she mumbles. She’s used to being overlooked. At least this doesn’t seem to have been on purpose. “I was-“

She stops, all words flying out of her head.

She’s looking at the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen.

“Yes?” she says, and even her voice is beautiful. “You were…?”

“I was- I was- nothing,” Anne babbles, dropping her papers again like a giant klutz.

“First day?” the woman asks, laughing, but not unkindly.

“Um, yeah,” Anne says.

“I’m Betty,” the vision says. “Betty Ross.”

“Oh, Banner,” Anne says. “Anne. I mean, Anne Banner.”

Betty laughs that musical laugh again. “Well, Banner, Anne Banner, let me show you around. What program are you in?”

“I’m undecided,” Anne says, following her like there’s a magnetic pull between them. She’s so preoccupied with watching Betty she walks into a pillar. “What are you here for?”

“Cellular Microbiology.”

Anne has no idea what that is. “Oh, me too,” falls out of her mouth.

“What a coincidence!” Betty says. “My roommate, Janet, is in the same program. I can lend you my notes; you don’t want hers, trust me. It’s not just that her handwriting is epically bad, which it is, but she tends to wander off into these obscure theories in the middle. It’s crazy, let me tell you.”

Anne just lets the sound of her voice wash over her.

She makes it a whole week before she finally has to confess that she is in fact in the theoretical physics department, and she hasn’t taken biology since the intro class freshman year of undergrad.

“I did get an A,” she mumbles, blushing over her whole face.

Betty, fortunately, thinks it’s funny. “Well, this way we won’t be directly competing,” she says over pizza one night, their (different) textbooks spread out around them. “Janet’s a wonderful friend, but if she edges me out in Professor Sanderson’s class again, I’m short-sheeting her bed. With love.”

Anne laughs with her, and resolves to at least read over Betty’s textbooks, so she has some chance of following her conversation.

The first time Betty catches her doing her homework without a calculator, Anne almost has a heart attack. “I, uh, I’m copying,” she says, ripping a page out of her notebook at random and tossing it in the trash. “You caught me.”

Betty raises an eyebrow. “Copying from who? Chris tells me you’re the darling of the physics department. Even the professor has to run to keep up with you.”

Anne turns bright red. That seems to happen to her a lot around Betty. “Well I don’t really think just so,” she says, which doesn’t even make sense.

“So you can do hard math in your head?” Betty asks.

Left without even ridiculous and implausible excuses to hide behind, Anne nods.

“That’s cool. I know who I’ll call if my calculator breaks again.”

And that’s the end of it.

Anne was too busy in college to make friends, and high school is… best not spoken of, and she’s still busy now, but there’s Betty. They get pizza together, and they study together, and they eat shitty cafeteria food together, and they laugh and watch terrible movies and paint each other’s nails.

Anne could watch the fall of her hair for hours.

Betty is popular, of course—how could anyone not love her?—but unlike Jenny she doesn’t seem to really enjoy it, preferring to hole up in her room with Anne, just the two of them.

Sometimes her roommate is there, but Janet has a pretty serious boyfriend and she’s gone a lot.

Maybe the best thing is how Betty never asks about her life before Culver, and she never shares any of her own. It’s like both their lives began the day they set foot on campus, and they never go further back than the year Betty’s been here before Anne arrived.

It’s maybe the best thing in Anne’s life, their friendship, so naturally she has to go and muck it all up.

They’re not even doing anything special, Betty’s talking about her lab that day and Anne’s putting red polish on Betty’s toenails and then out of absolutely nowhere Anne leans forward and kisses her.

Betty doesn’t quite stop talking in time, and they really more bump mouths than kiss.

Anne is completely mortified and upsets the nail polish all over Betty’s bed and runs out of the room.

Betty lets her hide for two days, but she knows Anne has lab on Wednesdays and you catch hell for skipping lab, and she knocks on the door and lets herself in.

Anne hasn’t slept at all, or showered, and she’s sure she looks manic and also pretty gross.

Betty comes and sits on her bed anyway.

“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” Betty says.

Anne wants to curl into a ball and disappear.

“And I’m really sorry—like, genuinely sorry, because you’re so amazing, but I just… don’t feel that way about you. About any girl, it’s not just you.”

Is it possible to die of embarrassment? “I’m so sorry,” Anne mumbles into her knees.

“Don’t be sorry,” Betty says. “I’m flattered, and like I said, you’re my best friend. I’m the one who’s sorry.”

As if perfect, shining Betty Ross would ever have to apologize to grubby little Anne Banner.

“I… don’t know quite what to do here,” Betty says. “I mean, I hope you still want to be friends-“

“Yes!” Anne shouts, and she never shouts, and it echoes around the tiny room and she buries her face in her knees again in acute mortification.

“Good, me too,” Betty says, always so together, so composed. “But if you need some… time, or space, or whatever, I’ll understand. Just let me know.”

Anne peeks out. Betty looks sincere, and Anne has never known her to be disingenuous. Can it really be so simple? Can they just pretend all this never happened? “No,” she says. “I’ve had plenty of… time and space.”

Betty gives the dirty room (Anne is always picking up after her, so Betty knows how much she hates clutter) and Anne’s stringy hair a dubious look. “Okay,” she says. “Whatever you want. But you should get up and go to lab now. Maybe have a shower.”

“Right,” Anne says. “I’ll do that.”

Betty smiles at her, and hugs her even though she’s gross and has been caught having unwelcome feelings, and leaves to let Anne get her shit together.

And they still study together, and watch movies, and paint each other’s nails, and Betty is as good as her word and they’re the best of friends.

Anne thinks she’d do anything for this woman.

~*~

Breanne Rebecca Banner is thirty years old. She has two doctorates and a best friend and she’s a long way from that little girl that hid between the couch and the radiator. She’s a long way from the girl who flew her starship _Enterprise_ around her room for hours, too, but nothing is perfect.

“You don’t have to,” Betty says.

“But it’s important to you,” Breanne Rebecca says.

Betty sighs, running a hand through her hair, looking more unsettled than her best friend has ever seen her. “My relationship with my father is… complicated,” she says.

“I understand.”

Betty gives her a look.

For Betty, she might even tell her the truth about Father, even though she’s never told anyone, not since the trial, not even Aunt Susan or Jenny. There must be something in her eyes, because Betty sighs and doesn’t press.

“Well, okay,” Betty says. “But you still don’t have to sign up for this project with me.”

Betty knows, and she knows, and Betty knows that she knows, that Betty is being asked as a courtesy, even though she’s the one with family connections. They’re really looking for Breanne Rebecca Banner.

“It’s fine,” she says, forcing a smile. “It’s not weapons research. They’re trying to protect people from radiation. What could be more important than that?”

When Breanne Rebecca meets General Ross for the first time, she almost turns and runs. She knows her shoulders hunch and she doesn’t win herself any points trying to make herself smaller.

The General, and he’s always ‘The General’, never Dad, or even Father, likes to shout a lot. So do most of the men on the base, but The General has shouting down to an art form. And he always insists on calling her by her first and middle names together, and he pronounces the first one with a weird accent, so it sounds like he’s saying ‘Brian’.

She and Betty do their research, and the army men poke and prod at them, and General Ross shouts at them, but Betty is there so it’s fine. Breanne (not Brian) Rebecca would do anything for Betty.

Some days they seem to make a lot of progress, and some days they don’t. She can’t understand it, because she’s hit plateaus in her research before, of course she has, but she can never predict these. It’s like she’s missing something here, and the carefully partitioned information packets with half the words blacked out don’t help.

She keeps remembering that little starship _Enterprise_ and its little book with the pictures.

She has all the pieces this time, but she’s beginning to doubt she has the right picture.

Then comes the day when Betty runs into her lab, crying.

She’s never seen Betty cry.

“They’re pulling our funding,” Betty says, sobbing into her shoulder. “The General just got back, and the subcommittee is tired of waiting for results.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I just-I just thought I’d finally do something, and he’d notice me,” Betty says.

You don’t want to be noticed.

“Nothing I’ve done has ever made him proud.”

“You’re perfect. You’re amazing and perfect, and of course he sees that, everyone can see that.”

Betty gives her a watery little smile. “At least you think so.” She sighs. “It’s just… we were so close.”

That night, Breanne Rebecca jolts awake in the middle of the night. She has an idea. It’s like the whole problem came together in her head, she can finally see the big picture, and she knows what they have to do.

The project is over; they’ve copied all their data over to disc drives to put in the archives, and the lab assistants have all packed up their bags and gone home.

But the equipment is still there.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of lives at stake here, all the people too close to a bomb detonation or a nuclear meltdown, and all the people who might be in the future.

And there’s Betty’s future, Betty who might still be able to earn her father’s love.

Breanne Rebecca Banner slips her lab coat over her pajamas and sneaks into the lab. She built most of this equipment. She knows what to do.

She doesn’t remember the explosion.

She doesn’t remember the shouts, and the fire department, and the rush of men and voices as the base goes on full alert, wondering where the attack came from.

The first thing she remembers is waking up in a hospital bed, and she’s covered in iridescent scales.

“Fascinating,” General Ross says, stroking her arm like she’s a fine statue in a museum. “They say it’s like a chameleon. The first few times they panicked and thought you’d walked away.”

And still he doesn’t notice Betty.

Betty crawls into Breanne Rebecca’s bed that night, and whispers the whole story to her.

“You’re insane,” she says. “I can’t believe you tested it on yourself.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“The scales sort of come and go, like the invisibility. No one’s ever seen anything like this before, so I guess you’ll just have to… figure it out as you go along?”

“I’m a freak,” Breanne Rebecca says flatly.

Betty hugs her, scales and all. “Never. I think it’s beautiful.”

She learns to control the invisibility, after a fashion, except it also responds to her subconscious, and soon there’s no mystery when she wants out of a conversation.

The scales stay.

About a thousand people in lab coats come to poke and prod at her and take samples, and she feels like a freak in a jar.

General Ross is getting excited. She hears him discussing her in loud whispers with other men with colors and pins all down the front of their jackets. She hears plans for invisible forces, special ops teams created from her blood, bioweapons that can’t be seen.

And so one night, she eases out of bed and creeps out of her (guarded) room. She rips a page off her medical chart, tears off a blank spot, and kisses it and slides it under Betty’s door. She hopes she understands.

And then she walks right off the base. There are advantages to being invisible.

~*~

A woman is thirty-two years old. She thinks. Time loses some of its meaning out here on the streets.

She used to catch sight of herself, sometimes, on TVs in store windows, or the great billboards in New York. General Ross had plastered her face on every media outlet in the United States, alternatively claiming that she’s been kidnapped, that she’s a dangerously unstable medical experiment, and that she stole valuable technology from the US Government and should be considered a terrorist.

Her one consolation is that Betty never appears beside him on the cameras.

She stops watching the news. If there’s a day Betty does appear, she doesn’t want to know about it.

While being invisible is, obviously, helpful when one is in hiding, it’s not helpful for anything else. There are CCTV cameras everywhere, so she can’t risk being visible for any length of time. She’s always careful to be completely covered when she has to sleep.

It means she can’t have a job, she can’t have an apartment, she can’t have a life. She lives on the streets, stealing what she needs, and she drifts from city to city stowed away on the back of buses, just… waiting.

Waiting for something to change.

She’s somewhere in Southern California now, because it’s winter and it seemed like the things to do.

Checking carefully for security cameras, she shimmers back into the visible spectrum behind a pizza joint, half a pizza rescued from the trash in her hands. There’s a tarp in the alley, not as dirty as it could be, and she wraps it around herself. People might comment on naked women in alleys, but they’ll definitely comment on levitating pizza. If she has to, she can always disappear.

She almost jumps out of her skin when a flying suit of armor clatters down not three feet from her.

She doesn’t drop the pizza, though, because she knows her priorities.

The faceplate goes back, and there’s a man inside the armor. “Huh,” he says. “The HUD was giving me readings that were just bizarre, insisting that nothing was there, but it was different than the rest of the nothing, and then, whoop, there you are.”

General Ross hadn’t had any technology that could detect her. She hopes this HUD isn’t widely distributed. She hopes she’ll be able to get away now.

“You look like you could use a meal. Or three.”

The trick to being invisible, she’s learned, is you can’t just stay in the same place you were standing, or move in a predictable way. She prepares herself to flee.

“Oh, hey, I know you!” the armored man says.

She freezes. No one’s recognized her so far.

“You’re the one old Thunderbolt Ross has got such a bug up his butt about,” he says. “Good on you.”

He gives her a thumbs-up, which looks very odd in the armor.

“Tell you what,” he says. “You tell me the story of how you pissed that bastard off so completely that smoke was literally rising from his ears, I’ll buy you a real pizza not scavenged from a dumpster and drop you anywhere you want to go. Seriously, anywhere. I have private jets, as in more than one. I’ll even throw in some sweats.”

She shouldn’t. She doesn’t know this man, and just because he’s weird, doesn’t mean it’s a good weird.

But she’s so hungry her stomach is knotting around her spine, and she’s cold even in balmy Southern California, and she thinks that cut on her arm is getting infected, and she’s so very, very tired of running.

And she can turn invisible if she has to get away.

“Alright,” she says. “One story for one meal.”

“You bet,” he says, whistling and rocking back and forth, armor clanking. “I asked Jarvis to send a car. I haven’t tried carrying people in the armor yet. Outside of emergencies. Which this isn’t, unless you bring that pizza any closer to your mouth. Seriously, I think it has mold on it.” He stops to take a breath. “Tony Stark, by the way.”

Her mouth drops open. She’s heard of Tony Stark, of course, but not… this. What has she missed, out here on the streets?

He must have heard her name on the news. He has to know who she is.

Does she?

She’s claimed and discarded many names for herself over the course of her life, and she isn’t sure which one belongs to a half-feral terrorist squatting naked in an alley.

“Dr. Banner,” she says at last, because that, she wants to keep.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, and an honest-to-god Lamborghini rolls up.

She falls asleep over the pizza. She can’t even blame Tony, because she nods off midword and doesn’t hold up her end of the bargain, either.

“No big deal,” he says, when she wakes and finds there’s pizza sauce all over a couch that probably cost more than her college apartment. “Tell me more about the colors Thunderbolt’s face can turn.”

He finally gets his story and she gets not only pizza but sushi and Thai takeout and pasta with meatballs.

It wouldn’t have taken all day but he kept interrupting.

And then she just sort of collapses on the couch again, and it’s now the third day.

The ugly cut on her arm is oozing something gross, and one of his robots—he has several—comes over and makes several clicking noises at it, which alerts his AI, Jarvis, who tells his PA, Pepper, and somehow she finds herself being fussed over by a no-doubt hideously expensive private doctor.

He drains it out and cleans it and stitches it up, and doesn’t say a word about the scales or the way she periodically disappears.

“That is so _cool_ ,” Tony says.

“Don’t be rude,” Pepper says, smiling. She’s beautiful, almost as beautiful as Betty, and the way she manages Tony is awe-inspiring. “I hope you’re feeling better.”

She nods dumbly.

“So I was thinking you should stay,” Tony says. “I hacked the army and read all about your research and your brain is just… amazing. The most perfect brain in all the world, except mine, obviously. Which, until you met me, you could always be the smartest person in the room, and I understand if that’s a lot to give up, but-“

Pepper elbows him. “Tony.”

“Come work for Stark Industries,” Tony says. “I’ll keep the army off your back, and you can research whatever you want in my ten floors of R&D, and you can do that Invisible Woman routine and play hide and seek with my robots. But not Dummy, he might cry.”

She wants to smile. There’s just something about Tony Stark that gives her a good feeling. Like she had for Jenny, her staunch ally, and for Betty, who although things ultimately ended… not well… still gave her some of the best years of her life.

“Well,” she says. “Okay. Maybe for a little while.”

Tony—there’s no other word for it— _beams._

“Great! I already had Pepper draw up the contracts. Not in a creepy way. Just being prepared. Pepper!”

“I’m right here,” Pepper says. “You’ll get used to the insanity,” she says, offering one perfectly manicured hand as if she isn’t talking to a homeless stray wearing one-size-fits-all sweats emblazoned with the Stark Industries logo. “I’m Pepper Potts, by the way.”

“Val,” she says, and she doesn’t really think about it before she says it, but she decides she likes it. “Dr. Val Banner.”

~*~

Eventually she gets the whole story of his kidnapping and fighting his CEO and mentor to the death in killer robot suits and becoming a superhero out of Tony, and he hears most of the sorry details of her epic fuck-up with the military project, and obviously in Tony Stark’s mind they’ve bonded because that’s the end of the personal questions.

Except about her name.

“So Val like Val Kilmer, or like Valerie?” he asks.

She pauses, because she’s in the act of signing her new Stark Industries contract and she’s pretty sure there are rules about using your actual legal name.

He waves a hand dismissively. “Keep going, doesn’t matter, just nosy.”

Even if he hadn’t… hacked the army, he has to know her real name, it’s plastered all over the news now that she’s resurfaced, but he hasn’t said a word about it.

She signs her name, and a specialist with a magnifying glass and lot of imagination might see ‘Doctor Val Banner’ in that mess.

General Ross is persistent, and somehow she ends up rooming at Tony’s sumptuous Malibu mansion.

“I stay here too, sometimes,” Pepper says. “It’s a Tony thing. Sometimes he just wants someone to talk to that he hasn’t had to build himself.”

That sort of takes the wind out of her sails, and her arguments just fail to manifest.

There is one excruciatingly awkward moment where Tony wanders into the main room kind of drunk and she kind of knocks over the couch and turns invisible for three days and not even Jarvis can find her, but Tony is as determined to never talk about the incident ever again as she is and she doesn’t see him drunk again, so it all turns out okay.

Tony doesn’t make a move on her (which, why would he, he’s Tony Stark, he could have anyone in the entire world), and his personal lab is drool-worthy, and he has this way of intruding on her life and running roughshod over it that’s kind of endearing while being simultaneously totally exasperating.

Such as now.

“This is sad,” Tony says, barreling into her lab with his usual regard for customs like knocking. “Sad. I think you might be missing something here. Hi, I’m Tony Stark, and I’m richer than that Scottish duck guy with the top hat.”

“You remembered all that, but not his name?” Val mutters, and is ignored.

“You can have anything, literally, and I don’t use that word lightly, literally anything you want, and you don’t even have a coffee mug, or a remote-activated espresso machine. Come on, what have you always wanted?”

Val doesn’t know what makes her say it. “To be invisible.”

That actually stops Tony, but only for about half a second. “Well you’ve already got that. Everyone wants something. You just need to find it.”

Is it Val’s imagination, or does that sound kind of ominous?

Tony takes her on a whirlwind world tour.

Little Becky Banner, rationing her free lunch card to last through school vacations, could never even have imagined something like this.

They go to Dubai and get a private viewing from the top of the tallest building in the world. They go to Australia and snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef. They go to Tokyo and spend a week in a place called Akihibara because Tony has some secret doll fetish or something. They go to France and see some car race—Tony moans and tells her she has no culture when she questions it—and then a soccer match in Liverpool and a hockey game in Magnitogorsk.

Val doesn’t even know how to pronounce that.

It’s all incredibly overwhelming, and fortunately Pepper catches up with them in Brazil and basically drags Tony back to Malibu by his ear.

“You can’t do this, Tony!” she lectures, the entire flight back to the United States.

Tony waves his arms in a complicated gesture that might be begging Val for a rescue.

“I didn’t hate Brazil,” Val says. “Did you know they have pink dolphins there?”

Tony throws up his hands.

~*~

Jenny takes a week off from saving the world to come to Malibu.

“I thought you were dead!” she sobs into Val’s shoulder. Or is she Bree again now?

“Sorry. I- I should have called.”

“Yes!” Jenny dashes the tears from her eyes. “Well, I guess I can see why you didn’t. At least I know you’re okay now.”

“And you’re just amazing as I always knew you’d be.”

“Well look at you! Dr. Banner, darling of Stark Industries.”

Val flushes. “No.”

“Yes!” Tony shouts from wherever he’s eavesdropping.

Jenny gives her another hug. “Mom misses you. Come and visit us sometime. You know, now that you have a private jet.”

“It’s not my jet,” Val says.

“I could build you some armor!” Tony calls.

~*~

Pepper is brilliant and intimidatingly competent, but she can’t watch Tony forever.

“Come on, we’re going to LA,” he says.

He grabs Val’s hand and leads her out of the lab like a recalcitrant toddler.

At least we’re still in the same state, Val reflects.

They even drive, which with Tony behind the wheel is slightly terrifying.

They go to Hollywood, of course, and cut past a long line of people in elegant formal wear standing on an actual red carpet.

“Um,” Val says, as flashbulbs go off in her face. She’s still wearing her lab coat, and her shoes have holes in them.

“Just put your hand up in front of your face,” Tony says.

At least Tony is wearing torn jeans and a band shirt, even if both of them probably cost as much as Val’s entire high school clothes budget, so she’s not the only one who’s underdressed.

It turns out they’re at a movie premiere, and Tony is fitted out in a fancy suit while Val is stuffed into a fluffy designer dress.

“It’s just for the movie part,” Tony promises, as they strap her into a pair of heels.

Val sighs.

The movie is called _The Martian_ , and it’s actually incredible.

Not that Val wouldn’t have been happy watching it with the rest of America in a musty theater eating over-priced popcorn, but she has to admit that the movie is amazing.

Tony is just insufferable, puffing up like a peacock with sheer, smug delight at finally finding something she likes. He wants to take her to the after party, but she’s so busy deconstructing every moment of science in the movie that they end up just sitting in his car ranting and waving their hands at each other.

Some of it is your usual movie “science”, of course, but there’s a real effort being made at a rational scientific basis for most of their tricks, and anyway Val isn’t one of those scientists who can’t enjoy time-traveling killer robots and warp drive.

And there’s something appealing about having a whole planet all to yourself.

“I’m in it,” Tony says, for about the thousandth time.

This is clearly his primary motivation for seeing the movie, and also probably why they were allowed in looking like they crawled out of a gutter, but he’s brilliant and Tony and gleefully talks science with her until the sun comes up even though he’s never shown the slightest interest in space as far as she knows.

He’s trying so hard, and she really did enjoy the movie, so in that weird pre-dawn hour where everything is misty and quiet, even in LA, she stares fixedly at where the door handle should be and says, “I wanted to be an astronaut when I was little.”

Tony stops talking mid-word.

“I was obsessed with space, had one of those mail-order telescopes and a lamp like a planetarium and a model _Enterprise_.”

“What happened?” Tony asks. “It obviously wasn’t the science.”

Val smiles, because Tony. “Allergies,” she says. “And being nearly legally blind. I wasn’t exactly Steve Rogers, but only because I was born into a world of vaccinations and antibiotics.”

“And no World War to sneak you in the back door,” Tony says, and claps her on the shoulder.

She kind of has a moment, and he tactfully fiddles with his Starkphone and lets her, except being Tony of course he wasn’t being tactful at all.

“Ah, Val as in Valentina Tereshkova!” he crows. “You little science nerd you, you’re adorable.”

She blushes.

~*~

A few weeks later, Val has tentatively concluded that Tony has discovered tact and decided to forget that whole conversation ever happened. She writes an article for a physics periodical that she probably won’t ever send, and she calls Betty. They haven’t spoken since Val’s disappearance.

She’s Betty, so of course she completely understands why Val left, and she’s furious with her father for his treatment of her.

“He has me watched, though,” Betty says. “I don’t know if it’s safe for us to meet.”

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” Val lies. “And I’m… happy, here, I guess. Tony’s been… well, Tony.”

Betty laughs. “I’m glad to hear it. I’m… happy, too. I found a new job, not with the army, and I… I’ve met someone.”

“That’s wonderful,” Val says. “There’s nothing I want more than for you to be happy.”

“I want the same for you,” Betty says. “Hey, so… is this your personal number? Can I call you again?”

“I’d like that,” Val says.

That’s pretty much the end of the conversation, and they hang up soon after. Val is getting ready for some serious brooding, but of course that’s when Tony comes barreling into her lab. Again.

“Stark Industries is going into space!” he announces.

She carefully sets down the phone. “What.”

“Space!” Tony shouts. “You know, stars and black holes and shit. It’s the new space race, private industry is the way to go. We’re going to colonize Mars!”

She adjusts her glasses. “Tony.”

“I tried to buy NASA but they said you can’t do that. Whatever.”

“Tony,” she says again.

He drops about a dozen Stark tablets in her lap. “I’m putting you in charge of the whole thing. And setting some new rules about the medical qualifications.”

Pepper eventually comes to rescue Val from Tony’s insanity, but in the end she still finds herself with a fancy title and a fancy office (conveniently built right into her lab) and an unlimited budget to just… poke around with anything vaguely space-related.

She tries to stick to what she knows, to doing something practical—well, as practical as theoretical physics ever is—but she can’t resist the lure of the stars.

There are whole months of her childhood, and adolescence, and possibly maybe young adult-hood where her primary aspiration was to join Starfleet.

So she opens some of Tony’s proposed project files, just to look, and right there on the top is an article lambasting crackpot astrophysicist Jane Foster.

Jane Foster, Ph.D., is one of Val’s personal heroes. She thinks she’s amazing, and brilliant, and Doctor Jane Foster never let anyone give her any shit about being a woman or thinking outside the box.

She opens up the article, and the references, and Jane Foster’s last three papers, and starts composing a scathing review.

~*~

Tony maybe possibly notices her fangirling over Doctor Foster, because he puts one of his highly illegal and moderately creepy stalker programs into place and Jarvis will periodically update them about what Doctor Foster is doing.

Tony thinks they should just drop in on her in New Mexico and introduce themselves, maybe in the Iron Man armor, but Val puts her foot down. It would be weird. And even creepier than the cyberstalking, possibly.

But then Tony barrels in—does he have any other way of entering a room?—grabs Val’s hand, and starts towing her out of the lab.

“I’m in the middle of an experiment,” Val says.

“Nope.”

“It’s time-sensitive,” she says, catching the doorframe and bracing herself.

Tony looks dismayed at her obtuseness, even though he hasn’t told her anything. “Val. One word, then you can go back to your whatever.”

Val can’t help her indignation at having her research referred to as ‘whatever.’

Tony does something weird with his face that is usually associated with kids in movies holding flashlights under their chin and making “woo woo” noises.

She rolls her eyes.

“Val,” he says. “ _Aliens_.”

They go to New Mexico.

~*~

They don’t take the Iron Man armor, because Val flatly refuses to cling to his back at Mach 3, why does he even think that’s a good idea, but they do take Tony’s private jet and land illegally in the New Mexico desert.

Jane Foster, Ph.D., and another woman greet them at the trailer door, brandishing a frying pan and a taser respectively.

Tony holds up his hands. “We come in peace. Take me to your leader.”

“Really, Tony?”

“Oh my god,” the strange woman says. “You’re Tony Stark.”

“Are you with the suits?” asks Jane Foster, Ph.D.

“I’ll have you know that while I have several suits, they don’t travel around on their own. Yet. Actually, maybe that’s a thing I should look into, Val, what do you think of—”

Val steps on his foot.

“Ow,” he says, even though he probably can’t feel it.

“So… why are you here?” taser woman asks.

“Doctor Banner here is a big fan,” Tony says. “Has pictures of Foster’s articles taped to her wall. Listens to recordings of her lectures while she sleeps. Has a hoard of VHS tapes, actual, I-kid-you-not—”

“I do _not_ ,” Val wails.

“Doctor Banner?” Jane Foster, Ph.D. says. “The physicist?”

Val maybe, sort of, squeals. A little. Doctor Jane Foster has heard of her.

Taser woman rolls her eyes and finally lowers her taser. “Ah, science nerds,” she says, in the tones usually reserved for things like ‘take this ring to Mt. Doom’.

“I make science nerd look good,” Tony says, preening.

She is not impressed. “I’m Darcy. This is Jane, which you obviously already knew. And really, Jane, a frying pan?”

“It has a certain style,” she says defensively.

“Oh, it’s a classic alright, but where did you find it? I thought all we had here was Poptarts and repurposed takeout containers. Except not Poptarts, not anymore.” She makes a tragic face, apparently mourning the lost Poptarts.

“So,” Tony says, interrupting what promises to be a long and much-cherished rant. “Where’s this alien?”

The alien calls himself Thor. Like the Norse god.

He has a brother named Loki, and a father named Odin.

Also like the Norse gods.

“I feel like we should be following the Prime Directive,” Val says, while this extraordinary pronouncement attempts to sink in. “Or be subject to it.”

“I know, right?” Doctor Jane Foster, call me Jane, says.

“He can’t really be an alien,” Darcy says.

Val has seen the pictures, and heard Darcy’s story about the van, and Jane’s about the atmospheric phenomena. She’s prepared to believe he’s an alien.

And he certainly seems to think so.

He tells them fantastic tales of golden palaces, flying ships, and magical armor.

Even Tony starts getting into it, but he goes back to tinkering with Darcy’s ipod when it’s clear that Thor is not whatever his society’s equivalent of a scientist is. He enjoys the technology, but he doesn’t have an intimate understanding of how it works.

“You really want to talk to my brother,” he says. “He is the greatest sorcerer in all the Nine Realms.”

Once Tony makes the executive decision to replace “magic” with “really advanced science” every time Thor mentions it, he gets fully on board with this.

“Great,” he says. “So how do you beam up to the mothership or whatever?”

Thor gets all sad and mournful, like a misbehaving puppy, and mumbles something about being banished.

Val is a little concerned about this, but she just can’t imagine Thor in the role of alien conqueror. Though possibly she should not be using movies as her basis for comparison.

Then again, what else could she use?

Jane finally gets around to explaining the comment about suits: mysterious sunglass-wearing secret agent types lurking around a tiny town in New Mexico, a facility growing up overnight around a fallen meteor.

“It is my hammer!” Thor announces. “We must go after it!”

“Sounds like the government is involved,” Tony says. “FBI, CIA, SHIELD, the whole alphabet soup. No one you want to mess with.”

“But my hammer,” Thor says.

“What’s so special about this hammer?”

“It allows me to fly,” Thor says.

Val laughs quietly at the face Tony makes.

“And call lightning.”

“So why do they call you ‘the Thunderer’?” Darcy wants to know.

“Okay, so some kind of highly advanced weapon,” Tony says. “Probably shouldn’t leave it just lying around, especially where the government might get their greedy little hands on it.”

“They can’t lift it,” Thor says. He sounds very sure. Though he sounds very sure about everything he says. “It can only be lifted by one who is worthy.”

Tony’s face contorts as he tries to fit that into his worldview. “Okay, so it’s got some kind of forcefield,” he says finally. “So they can’t actually do anything with it.”

“No,” Thor says. “But I must retrieve it. To prove myself worthy so I can return home.”

“So this is like one of those fairy tales,” Darcy says. “You have to redeem yourself for whatever it is that got you banished.”

Thor winces, but doesn’t explain what that is.

“That’s not really how redemption stories work,” Tony says. “The hammer is what, a few miles away? You can’t just walk over there and pick it up. There are… ordeals, and such.”

Val gives him a sharp look.

“But it’s my hammer,” Thor says.

Tony rolls his eyes. “I’m sensing a theme here. Fine, let’s go investigate. If it’s the actual government, we’re all going to Malibu and we can try and steal it later. If it’s SHIELD, I might be able to arrange something, and then we can all go to Malibu.”

“Um,” Jane says. “Why are we all going to Malibu?”

Darcy elbows her. “Shh! Why are you questioning it?”

“Some hammer falls from the sky that no one can lift, and totally coincidentally an alien turns up in the nearest town? Yeah, I can’t see how that might end badly for any of you,” Tony says. “I already know about him, and the government might take a few more days, but SHIELD runs on Stark Tech. They’ll know, and they’ll extract everything that _you_ know out of your brains and your research.”

“My research?” Jane repeats.

“Yes,” Tony says, like he’s speaking to a small child. “Your research is in danger. It should go to Malibu where it can be safe.”

“Yeah, and there’s no chance a freaking private jet landing in the backyard might draw attention to our little operation,” Darcy says.

“Well, that too.”

~*~

Val is not interested in drawing the attention of any kind of suit, government or otherwise, and waits in the car. It is SHIELD, and she misses Tony talking his way in, Thor dramatically trying to lift the hammer and failing, and Jane poking a suit into submission when he tries to stop them leaving.

She does hear all about it after, especially the parts where Tony was, apparently, amazing.

“Whatever,” Darcy says.

They collect the last member of Jane’s research team, Dr. Erik Selvig, and all of her equipment is—very carefully—loaded onto Tony’s jet, and they’re on their way back to Malibu before anyone can stop them.

Val and Selvig had met at Culver, he was a professor there, though not in her department, and of course she has followed Jane’s research closely—but not in a weird way, _Tony_ —and they happily talk astrophysics the whole flight back.

Darcy and Tony roll their eyes a lot, and play games on Tony’s Stark tablet.

Thor mostly sulks.

“I’ll try and get them to send the hammer,” Tony says. “If they cut the rock around it, can they lift that?”

Thor doesn’t know.

“Well, SHIELD will guard it against all comers, they’re very territorial that way.”

Val snorts. Like Tony isn’t fanatical about everything he considers his, up to and including the Iron Man armor.

“So it’s safe for now. Well, safe-ish.”

At some point during the flight, Tony had called Pepper and had her clean out one of the garages.

“It isn’t much,” he says, flipping on the lights in the bare room. “But I can get some equipment brought in here. Whatever you need.”

Jane looks a little overwhelmed.

Val can sympathize.

Tony claps his hands. “I’ll call someone to get all this equipment in here, and then we can get started!”

“Um,” Jane says. “Started with what?”

“You said you knew what brought him here!” Tony says, jerking a thumb at Thor.

“Well, it looks like an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, but that’s just theoretical, we’re years away from any sort of prototype,” she says.

“Not,” Tony says, “with a fully-funded project and Stark R&D at your disposal. Not to mention a bonafide alien, and Fangirl Banner over here.”

Val scowls at him.

“The people in this room represent about 50% of the planet’s total IQ,” Tony says. “Maybe more. Actually, I’m here, so definitely more.”

Val sighs and adjusts her glasses. “Maybe we should get Susan Storm in here,” she says. “She does a lot of work with space.”

Tony scowls. Susan Storm means Reed Richards, and for some reason Val just can’t work out, no matter how often Tony voices his litany of complaints, Tony hates him.

He doesn’t seem like a bad guy, and Dr. Storm is brilliant.

And they both have superpowers, so will probably understand the sensitivity of this project.

“Fine,” Tony says, and Val almost drops her glasses. “But I don’t have to work in the same room as Richards, and she comes in the superhero suit.”

“I don’t think she’ll go for that.”

“Well, a man can dream.”

“Do you even know anything about space?” Darcy interrupts, in the voice of one who is firmly on the outside of the science talk. “I thought you built weapons. And robots. And weapons that are also robots.”

Tony gets a slightly manic look in his eye. “How hard can it be?”

Val has nightmare visions of Tony trying to get a degree in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight. “We could use robots in space,” she says. “To… build ships in zero-g. And… arrays.”

Darcy gives her a look. The look says: you saw that in a movie, and I am onto you.

But apparently Tony didn’t see it, because he’s off and chattering to Jarvis about building spaceships.

Jane edges closer. “That’s not really how an Einstein-Rosen Bridge works,” she says. “We might need a ship, to survive in the wormhole, but it could just be transported from surface to surface. Theoretically.”

Val shrugs. “It will keep him busy.”

“I heard that!” Tony shouts.

“I still don’t understand what we’re doing,” Darcy says.

Tony jumps out from behind her, startling all of them. “Space! Alien planet! Flying cars!”

“Didn’t Stark Industries already build a flying car?” Darcy asks.

“I’ve seen your cars, and they’re really more like ships,” Thor says. “Like the kind that goes on the ocean.”

Tony waves his hand, dismissing all that detail. “Somewhere out there, is a planet chockful of advanced technology, and an alien wizard—”

“Sorcerer,” Thor corrects.

“— _scientist_ who can explain all of it to me. From what Thor said he’s the less stylish and not quite as brilliant Asgardian equivalent of me.”

“My brother is very stylish,” Thor protests.

Val doesn’t know which of them to be more annoyed with. “And you said _I_ was fangirling.”

Tony doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. “Even if we can’t make the bridge work for human transportation, we just have to communicate somehow, convince them to open the bridge on their end.”

“Asgard and Midgard have not been in contact for thousands of years,” Thor says.

“I’m Tony Stark,” Tony says. He claps his hands. “Now let’s get to work!”

~*~

All things considered, Jane and Darcy take being snatched from their metaphorical beds and deposited in someone else’s house pretty well.

It helps that it’s Tony Stark’s Malibu mansion, and that Tony wasn’t kidding about that unlimited research budget.

Dr. Selvig decides that he doesn’t like the atmosphere—too young, he claims—and accepts a position with SHIELD. Thor decides to go with him. Tony has extracted every detail about Asgard’s bridge, which they call a Bifrost, and Thor is bored. He’s a warrior from a warrior culture, and SHIELD promises to find some place he can fit in.

They tested him in a simulated fight, and de-powered and theoretically an ordinary human, he still made them look incompetent. Val suspects they’re playing hard to get with all this ‘maybe we can find a place for you’, and that they’re salivating at the idea of employing a former alien god-prince.

Tony calls them both traitors and a government stooges, behind their backs and to their faces, but he gives them each a brand new Starkphone and sternly informs them that he expects updates on the hammer.

Weeks pass, summer ends, and Darcy goes back to college to finish her degree. She promises to add a few extra courses to her political science degree and that she’ll come back as the world’s first expert in alien cultures.

That should be interesting, Val thinks.

Tony revolutionizes a few things in space shuttle technology then kind of loses interest, going back to running a Fortune 500 company and superheroing and inventing things and whatever else he normally does, though that doesn’t stop him from barreling in and bothering Val for updates whenever he has a free moment.

Dr. Richards and Dr. Storm, now Doctors Storm-Richards, do drop in to help in between their own bouts of superheroing.

“I didn’t want to give up my name,” Dr. Storm-Richards, call me Sue, says. “I told Reed he should take mine, but then he would be Reed Storm, and we decided that would be too ridiculous.”

Tony would never have let him hear the end of it. Though is it really any worse than calling yourself ‘Mr. Fantastic’?

“I didn’t come up with the name,” Dr. Storm-Richards, call me Reed, grumbles.

“So we both hyphenated. If anyone needs one of us they usually need the other, so it’s not too confusing. And yeah, it’s a bit of a mouthful, but we both have careers, and publications, you know?”

Val and Jane both nod, even though Val at least really doesn’t. Why couldn’t they have just kept their own names? It’s not like they would be any less married.

The first time they visit, Tony and Reed go and shout at each other for a bit, or at least Tony shouts and Reed just looks vaguely apologetic, and Jane takes it upon herself to try and mediate.

“So I hear you can turn yourself invisible,” Sue says.

Val stares very hard at the monitor in front of her. “Sort of. Yours is much cooler. Plus the forcefield thing.”

“I don’t know, that’s pretty cool,” Sue says, and Val realizes, oops, she’s been wishing herself invisible so hard it actually happened.

She’s still really self-conscious about the scales, even though no one’s said anything, except Tony who claims they’re gorgeous, and he would know, he once slept with an entire calendar of models, it’s not very, well, human.

“And I still show up on infrared,” Sue says casually, as if people go invisible around her every day. “Is it true you don’t?”

“No. I mean yes. No infrared,” Val says, sounding like an idiot, as usual. “Tony tried everything he could think of, and I can’t be seen. Of course, I still have to breathe, and my heart still beats and everything, so you just have to listen.”

“Still,” Sue says. “Impressive.”

Val fidgets with her glasses. “Not really. And I’m not doing anything with it. Not like you.”

Sue puts a hand on her scaly arm. “By the time the Fantastic Four get called in, the city’s already on fire and all we can do is try and contain the damage. This? Trying to open negotiations with aliens? That’s much more important. You have the chance to catch trouble before it even happens.”

Val hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. “But I’m not even using my,” she squirms, “superpowers.”

“And when Reed and I are out there punching Doombots, do you think I’m using my two doctorates? You’re using your other gifts. Nothing wrong with that.”

Val isn’t really convinced; everyone else seems to manage being a superhero and a scientist just fine, but she doesn’t say anything, and Sue lets the subject drop.

~*~

The redistribution of people means that Val and Jane spend a lot of time working together.

Alone.

Val is reminded of that problem she has with gorgeous, brilliant, scarily-competent lady scientists at the most inconvenient times.

She tries to remind herself that Dr. Foster is about ten years younger than she is, and had that sort-of thing with Thor, and anyway probably has a thousand people chasing after her who are way more interesting, attractive, and human than Val Banner.

Mostly all that happens is she drops things a lot, and her stutter makes a reappearance, but Jane is so gracious and kind that she doesn’t say anything about Val’s spectacular klutziness.

Unlike Tony.

“Ah,” Tony says, the first time he witnesses one of her displays. “That explains a lot.”

“Please don’t say anything,” she begs.

He gives her a hard time about it of course, calling her clumsiness ‘the mating dance of Val Banner’ and putting together a fake Wikipedia page about it.

But he doesn’t post it, and he doesn’t say anything to Jane.

~*~

What Tony doesn’t seem to understand is that the Einstein-Rosen Bridge is going to take years to create.

“I can get more people,” he says blankly, when Jane tries to explain this to him, using small words.

“You’re looking at the only two astrophysicists in the world who don’t think I watched too much Star Trek while taking the good drugs,” Jane says, because sometimes you have to tailor an explanation to Tony’s level.

“You’re an astrophysicist?” he says to Val, fixating on the first part of that sentence.

She shrugs self-consciously. “It seemed the thing to do. Jane insisted on putting me as co-author, and I didn’t want to bring down her reputation.”

“What reputation?” she asks, patting Val’s shoulder fondly.

Tony bounces his eyebrows at them.

“It wasn’t hard to pick up a few classes,” Val says. “It’s a little weird to be working for college credit again, but not a bad weird.”

“Some people buy a new tie when trying to impress a girl,” Tony says later, when he’s cornered Val by the coffee maker. “Or a Rolex. And then there’s the elusive Val Banner, who gets a doctorate in astrophysics.”

“It’s just a master’s degree,” Val mumbles into her cup. “And I haven’t even finished it yet.”

Tony laughs at her.

~*~

It’s a perfectly ordinary day of research and science and unrequited crushing when there’s a flash of green light and suddenly a man is standing in the middle of the lab.

Teleportation, Val thinks, pushing her glasses up her nose. She expected there would be smoke. It’s a little disappointing.

“I am Loki, King of Asgard,” he says.

“Jarvis, call Tony,” Val says.

~*~

No one in the history of the universe has ever been as excited about anything as Tony is about King Loki.

It’s not even fun giving him a hard time about it because he is just so far gone.

“Thor is in a top-secret government facility,” Tony says. “Not being dissected or probed or anything, he’s working there.”

“Tony,” Val says.

“He’s also keeping an eye on that hammer, he’s real excited about his hammer.”

“Tony,” Jane says.

“I could take you there. I have clearance, I think, maybe, I could have Jarvis whip something up, and anyway I fund SHIELD, basically own it, but you shouldn’t teleport, might shoot you, could be bad, can you fly, I can take my armor…”

“What is happening?” Pepper asks, joining Val and Jane in their fascinated staring.

“Well,” Val says, “an alien sorcerer-king teleported into the lab this morning. From another planet.”

“I’ll cancel his meetings,” Pepper says.

~*~

A de-powered exile like Thor can be quietly swept under the carpet. Aliens, what aliens?

Loki, not so much.

Tony is forced to share him with every government in the world, who are all scrambling to develop policies for real life aliens with real life governments of their own, and the media, and other scientists, and the media again.

Somewhere in all the hullabaloo, Thor also gets to see his brother.

Val is there for the reunion, hovering in the background and pretending to be invisible—though not actually invisible, which is nice. Thor’s mother sends her best. His father has apparently been asleep for the entire year Thor has been on Earth, which is why Loki is king. His friends are well. Loki is renegotiating all the treaties between Asgard and the other planets.

Other planets. Multiple, inhabited planets, with aliens and cultures and technologies of their own.

Val can’t suppress a little shiver of excitement.

She helped find Thor, sort of, and King Loki appeared in her lab, even if it’s technically Tony’s and at least half Jane’s, and she’s been working on the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, though not alone.

Maybe, one day, she might get to see one of these other worlds. To walk on the surface of another planet.

“You’re shimmering,” Tony says. The brotherly reunion has progressed to tears and hugs, and he must have slunk away.

Val can’t even bring herself to care.

~*~

Life seems to have jumped to an accelerated track.

Tony puts together a team of superheroes, and he comes back to the lab at least once a week with dents in his armor and grumbling under his breath about Doombots or Hydra, or, interestingly, SHIELD, and once, a giant planet-eating monster (she doesn’t ask).

Jane builds her bridge. Asgard doesn’t have anything to offer as far as how to aim it, apparently they have a guy who can literally see everything in the universe, and his whole job is to stand there and point the Bifrost at things. Tony has about ten fits about it, and then Stark Industries kicks off a bidding war for the first spaceship to go through Jane’s bridge, on the theory that if they miss a little, it’s better to miss in the vacuum of space and not actually on the surface of a planet.

Thor travels to somewhere called Jotunheim, performs whatever the Asgardian equivalent of the labors of Hercules is, and apologizes very sincerely for whatever it is that he did. When he returns to Earth, his hammer comes to his hand, and he does this whole armor thing that’s actually pretty cool and makes Tony incredibly jealous, at least until he replicates it.

King Loki becomes Ambassador Loki, and he travels between all the realms with what—according to Thor—is his unique gift to walk between the worlds. He’s called Skywalker, on Asgard, and is a surprisingly good sport when Tony makes him watch all the Star Wars movies, even the prequels, and laughs basically through the entire thing.

And Val and Jane go on a date, and it isn’t a total disaster. And then they go on a really weird double-date with Betty and her fiancée, and that isn’t a total disaster, either.

All in all, things have turned out pretty well. Better than Val ever imagined her life could go, even before the accident. She might even go so far as to say she’s happy.

~*~

Doctor Breanne Rebecca Banner, call me Val, is old now. Her hair is greying in the most unfortunate way possible, and her scales have lost some of their shine. Jane’s hair, of course, has gone a uniform, dignified white. Her smile is as beautiful as ever, and she’s certainly smiling now.

Val takes a deep breath. There’s wind in her hair, and soft grass under her bare feet.

“Loki said this was Vanaheim,” Jane says, giving their faithful starship a fond pat. It has ‘Enterprise’ spray-painted on the side in what looks suspiciously like the same shade of red as the Iron Man armor.

Jane unzips her Stark Tech spacesuit, and she has a science blue Star Trek shirt on underneath. Val won’t judge; she does, too.

Val has about a thousand experiments she wants to run and samples she wants to gather, she wants to meet everyone on the planet and know every detail about their lives, but right now, she just wants to feel the alien sun on her skin and smell the alien pollen in the air, exploring an alien planet with Jane at her side.

The two loves of her life.

She sneezes.

It’s perfect.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for The Final Frontier by TA Salmalin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8520670) by [paleogymnast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paleogymnast/pseuds/paleogymnast)




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